7 Key Customer Experience Trends for 2018

By Patrick Haughey

A C-Level focus on customer experience, virtual consultations, WhatsApp-style messaging, Blended AI – these are just some of the trends that our panel of CX experts are seeing in their crystal balls for 2018.

So if you want to be “Born Ready” for the next big things in Customer Experience, read on for some great insights.

“The number one cx trend is simply a focus on it. In the past companies might set up a customer experience “team,” or ask the contact center to own it, but now there is truly a c-level focus on customer experience. There’s an awareness that someone at the very top needs to drive customer experience, and it won’t be part of the company culture by accident. A leader must drive customer experience throughout the organization by ensuring accountability.”

“I think we will continue to see an attempt to provide in-home or virtual consultation experiences to build relationship and trust with consumers, learn about needs, and sell complex solutions that include proprietary and third-party products.”

“Watch for a major trend in CX support through 2018 in the form of consumers demanding enterprises service them via smartphone messenger services (such as WhatsApp). With SMS-based texting appearing to be in decline while newer, fresher and less restrictive options gain mainstream acceptance, enterprises will need to adapt to this new reality.

But this need not be a challenge, as those firms handling their SMS channels through the right investments around analytics, AI and automation will be well-positioned to shift toward these new messenger-based applications. In doing so, they will be ensuring more end-user stickiness and long-term revenue sustainability.”

“A welcome trend I’m seeing is tools creating interconnectedness among teams to drive a positive customer experience. Whether through plugins in your CRM or tools like Front, collaborating with other teams to ensure the right person weighs-in or drives an issue to resolution is getting easier all the time.”

“2018 will be the year of blended AI—even though interest in AI and chatbots is increasing, human interaction will never go away. While some brands have goals of decreasing their call volume by 50%, real-time interaction will increase (as evident by the Forrester prediction that more brands will phase out email in favor of real-time customer engagement communications). Human interaction will be at the epicenter driving AI in customer service, and is imperative for it to be successful and not see satisfaction levels drop. We still need cognitive thinking that can tweak the algorithms and step in to help customers when needed – brands shouldn’t leave everything to a bot.”

“As Customer emotions are starting to become more accepted, more advanced organizations are already moving on from this and looking at the cause of why customers are feeling these emotions. In 2018 the more advanced Customer Experience companies will advance from just understanding that customers feel emotions but to ask themselves, “why do Customers feel emotions and what can we do to change and manage this?”

Organizations will need to have a deep understanding of customers’ behaviour and their decision-making. This, in turn, takes you into the field of psychology and behavioural economics which will become more significant for the Customer Experience in 2018.”

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The team here at Voxpro are always thinking and writing about the future of CX so that we can continue to deliver cutting-edge Beautiful Customer Experience on behalf of our global partners. Here are some of our recent musings:

Patrick used to produce national Radio and TV talk shows. Then one day he walked into Voxpro and demanded to be appointed Content Editor so he could write and talk about all of the great things the company's doing. We said yes.